Royal commission: Abuse still haunts Queensland man four decades on

It came in November this year when the school teacher who molested him while on a school camp, Wilfred Mentink, was thrown in jail.

Mr Johnston, who was just 14 when he was sexually abused, said the vile acts he had to endure still haunt him to this day.

His heart goes out to the thousands of child abuse victims hoping for justice today as the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hands down its final report.

“We want action. Really people have to take the attitude [that] it all starts now,” he said.

The damage caused

The former Salisbury High School student easily recalls the frightening school camp trip at Mount Barney in the Scenic Rim, when he and several of his fellow students fell victim to Mentink’s predatory behaviour.

“The teacher proceeded to wander around all weekend naked,” he said.

“Some of the things we witnessed was an abomination at the way kids should be treated by an adult.

Now 55, he would like to stare down his abuser and make him account for what he did.

“Your brain is rewired where you do not know what is going on and have to have years of therapy to get to the point where you can function.

“I find myself with five kids from three different mothers.”

He said some of what happened haunts him.

“You might be a narcissistic man. I do not know why you choose to have relationships with children rather than adults,” he said.

“That is an issue for you mate

“That is something you need to live with and think very deeply while you are in jail about what you have done.”

‘We want action’

Mr Johnston now serves on the Queensland Child Sexual Abuse Legislative Reform Committee and advocates for those affected by abuse.

He said the royal commission had made some people accountable, but not enough.

“People who have covered up this sort of stuff need to be held to account,” he said.

“There is not one person in Australia that I am aware of that has been convicted of concealing these sorts of crimes.

“But I am sceptical that things will change.”

On the final day of the royal commission yesterday, Justice Peter McClellan handed a book of survivors’ harrowing accounts to the National Library of Australia.

“The conjunction of events that the royal commission has examined can only be described as a national tragedy,” Justice McClellan said.

Queensland Child Protection Committee chair Elizabeth Kobierski said those words are not much different to those uttered by then prime minister Julia Gillard when she announced the commission in 2012.

“She called child abuse vile and hideous,” Ms Kobierski said.

“The beginning and the end. Now people have recognised this has been a shocking experience for many young people.

“I notice some 15,000 people have come forward to different ways to tell their stories.

“I do not think that represents all those people impacted or currently impacted.

“This is an ongoing issue that we all have to pay attention to.

“In my strongest words I can say stand up adults, let’s be protective, let’s be aware and make sure our children get the best possible chance they have moving forward.”

Convicted paedophile held in East Timor over child porn

A convicted Australian paedophile has been remanded in custody in East Timor after being found with pornographic images of Timorese children.

Wilfred Mentink, 56, is also facing charges of illegally entering East Timor after defying a deportation order issued in June.

Mentink was arrested by United Nations and East Timorese police last week when they searched his yacht and found nearly 40 items relating to child pornography, including photographs, CDs and two laptop computers.

He was remanded in custody for 30 days by an East Timorese court while further investigations are carried out.

Mentink was jailed for six years in the Australian state of Queensland in 1993 after pleading guilty to child sex abuse charges.

Australian pedophile given 48 hours to leave

A convicted Australian pedophile has been ordered to leave East Timor after a pioneering joint operation involving Australian and East Timorese police.

Dili immigration authorities gave former Queenslander Wilfred Mentink 48 hours to leave the country after he sailed into Dili harbour on Wednesday on board his yacht Loris.

Acting United Nations Police Commissioner Dennis McDermott said Mr Mentink had been turned back after failing to declare his convictions on immigration entry documents.

“It’s a first example of co-operation on this question,” he said. Australian and East Timorese police had been tracking the yacht’s movements before it arrived in Dili.

In September 1993 Mentink pleaded guilty in a Queensland court to charges of having sex with a minor and indecently dealing with another minor.

He received a nine-year sentence, later reduced on appeal to six years, and was released on parole in 1996.

Customs and immigration officials boarded and searched the yacht early on Wednesday, later informing Mr Mentink he could not land because he had made false statements on an immigration entry form.

Bernadette McMenamin, of the child protection group Child Wise, said it was “an excellent development”.

Speaking from Melbourne, she said it pointed to the need for Australia to go further, by obliging convicted pedophiles to report to police before leaving the country, following British practice.

“In this case they have turned back someone who could have seriously harmed East Timorese children, who are among the most vulnerable in the world,” she said. “If there is not closer monitoring, East Timor could go the way of Cambodia.”

East Timorese police are increasingly concerned about pedophile and prostitution rings, whose clients are mainly international.

Paedophile paramedic sentenced to 13 years’ jail for sexual abuse of 22 girls across three states

By Isobel Roe

Updated 5 May 2017, 6:28pm

A former Queensland ambulance officer has been sentenced to 13 years in jail for “depraved” sexual abuse of 22 young girls across several states over a 10-year period.

The victims of 49-year-old Jason David Brooker were in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, with the youngest being 11 years old.

Brooker, who was between 38 and 47 years of age at the time of offending, contacted young girls via social media sites Kik, Tagged and Facebook using the name ‘Jaz’, ‘David Bourne’ or ‘David Brook’.

In the District Court in Toowoomba on Tuesday, Brooker pleaded guilty to 57 charges, including maintaining a relationship with a child under 16, carnal knowledge, indecent treatment and making and possessing child exploitation material.

The offending was carried out from Brooker’s home in Warwick on Queensland’s Southern Downs between 2005 and 2015, when one victim raised the alarm and police raided his property.

The court heard Brooker often paid for mobile phone credit for the young girls or offered to “get them into modelling” in exchange for naked photographs, and threatened to release the photos on the internet if the girls did not comply with requests for more explicit material.

Offender videoed sex with 14yo girl

Crown prosecutor Elizabeth Kelso told the court the most serious offending was involving a 14-year-old girl, who he lured via social media pretending to be a 16-year-old boy.

After several webcam chats where Brooker asked the girl to take off her clothes, the pair met multiple times including at a park and a hotel in the Brisbane suburb of Brookside.

Ms Kelso told the court the girl had not told her parents where she was going.

“[Brooker] filmed some of those interactions,” Ms Kelso said.

“In that footage he can be seen undressing the complainant.”

The pair then had sexual intercourse, which was also recorded on video.

‘I was made to feel like a disgusting human being’

During police raids of Brooker’s Warwick home in 2015, officers found a disc containing 83 photos of the girl in states of undress.

The court was read a victim impact statement from that girl, who is now an adult.

“[I] feel sick because of the visual memories,” the statement read.

“I feared for my life and my family’s too — I was made to feel like a disgusting human being.”

Ms Kelso said Brooker would request naked pictures and send pictures of his own genitalia to other girls.

The victims often found out the person they were talking to was not a 16-year-old boy when Brooker turned on his own webcam.

Ms Kelso said Brooker would often tell his victims he loved. If they refused his advances, he would threaten the victims with knowing where they lived.

“If the complainants became reluctant or started to ignore the defendant, he became angry,” she said.

“Where he had provided them money, he would tell them he felt he’d been ripped off.”

Ms Kelso said the most disturbing thing about Brooker’s conduct was the “meticulous” nature of the thousands of photos and videos in his child exploitation collection, found during the police raids.

Some of the exploitation material was of children as young as three years old.

“Not only was is stored electronically, it was also stored on CDs identified with the girls name, age and locations,” Ms Kelso said.

The raids also uncovered stolen prescription drugs and uniforms from the Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS).

Brooker left the QAS during the 10 years of offending and began to work for a private firm as a paramedic.

Offender wrote apology letter, court told

Brooker’s defence lawyer David Jones told the court his client had not shared any of the child exploitation material he created.

He said Brooker’s conduct was largely inexplicable, but he had written a letter of apology and was on the road to rehabilitation.

In sentencing, Judge Deborah Richards told the court one incident involved threatening a young child with harm.

Brett Peter Cowan: Daniel Morcombe’s killer had long history of preying on children

Fri 14 Mar 2014, 7:50am

Daniel Morcombe’s killer Brett Peter Cowan is a serial predator with an extensive history of sexually abusing children.

The 44-year-year told an inquest into Daniel’s disappearance that by the time he turned 18 he had already preyed on up to 30 children.

He said his offending stretched back to when he was about nine or 10 years of age.

However, he was first convicted of a child sex offence in 1989 over the molestation of a seven-year-old boy in the public toilets of a Queensland playground.

He was sentenced to two years for indecent dealing.

Four years later while living in a Darwin caravan park, Cowan molested a six-year-old boy in a violent attack which left the child with a punctured lung.

Cowan left the boy to die in an old car in bushland before the naked, dazed and bleeding child staggered into a service station for help.

After initially denying any involvement in the attack, Cowan confessed after police told him they had found DNA evidence linking him to the crime.

In September 1993, Cowan pleaded guilty to gross indecency, grievous bodily harm and deprivation of liberty and was sentenced to seven years in jail.

After his release from prison on parole in 1998 he moved to the Sunshine Coast to be close to relatives and soon became involved in the Christian Outreach Church.

He met Tracey Moncrieff through the church and in 1999 they later married and had a child.

The couple were living in Beerwah at the time Daniel went missing. They divorced in 2004.

Cowan was an early suspect in Daniel’s disappearance and was first interviewed by police two weeks after the 13-year-old went missing. Officers interviewed him again in 2005.

For an unexplained reason, Cowan changed his name to Shaddo N-Unyah Hunter between 2003 and a 2011 inquest into Daniel’s disappearance, at which he was called to give evidence.

“I had nothing to do with Daniel’s disappearance, nothing at all,” he told the court.

However, shortly after Cowan’s appearance at the inquest he told undercover police officers that he picked Daniel up from a bus stop to “have fun” with him.

He told the officers, who were posing as criminal gang members, that he drove Daniel to a demountable building on a macadamia farm in a secluded bushland area in Beerwah with the intention of molesting him.

He said he invited Daniel in for a drink of water and tried to pull his pants down.

When Daniel said “Oh no” and began to struggle, Cowan said he choked him with his arm around his neck.

Cowan told the officers he disposed of Daniel’s body in an old sand mining area.

Daniel’s bone fragments were later found at the site.

Cowan was arrested and charged with Daniel’s murder in August 2011 and was found guilty in March 2014.